The present invention relates to liquid handling and analyzing, and more particularly, to an apparatus and method for processing blood samples including scanning and separating the samples without human intervention.
The modern clinical pathology lab of today includes several machines to accurately analyze blood samples for a wide range of characteristics and diseases. Recently, with the development of microprocessing equipment, more and more of the blood analysis can be quickly and accurately performed by automation. Electronic equipment capable of analyzing the condition of blood that was not even dreamed possible just a few years ago, such as analysis of cholesterol in the blood, is available on a wide scale. Other photo-analyzers for blood and its components have been developed and refined where they are now standard equipment in the laboratory. Analyzing techniques for viruses and other foreign bodies in the blood are rapidly advancing also.
While the analyzers per se have thus advanced rapidly in the past few years, the system for handling the blood samples in the sample tubes has remained substantially unchanged. The blood samples are generally taken by drawing directly from the patient into a pre-evacuated tube. A needle extending from the heavy rubber stopper of the tube is injected into a vein of the patient and the blood flows through the needle and into the tube due of ambient pressure. The sample tube is then manually labeled and transferred by a carrier to the centrifuge in another portion of the laboratory. At the centrifuge, the technician removes the sample tube from the carrier and places it into the centrifuge along with other samples (or sample tubes of water to balance the centrifuge).
The centrifuge is operative to separate the blood cells from the serum. This allows the pathologist and others to more efficiently study the blood sample. The standard practice is to remove the sample tube with the separated blood cells/serum and once again place the tube in another holder or rack whereupon the serum is aspirated from the upper portion of the tube. The aspiration step is usually performed manually. From this point, the sample tube along with the sample cups in which the serum has been placed must be tagged and are analyzed by machine, or visually by the pathologist or other technicians.
Throughout the process of manual handling of the sample tubes/cups, described above, the personnel are exposed to the potential of coming into contact with the blood. If a sample tube or cup breaks, the blood of the sample can inadvertently splash in the eyes or other cavity of the testing personnel. With the discovery of the AIDS virus, this contingency can even be deadly.
In addition to the risk involved in the manual handling of the blood, the cost of human intervention is substantial. Even more so today with the spreading of the AIDS virus, the personnel must be more highly trained and paid than before. The cost to the laboratory, and eventually to the general public, is becoming a major concern of the health industry.
Thus, a need is identified for a different approach to processing of blood samples, or broadly other dangerous liquids, where human intervention is minimized. The cost in paying humans to perform the handling/analyzing steps has simply become too great and the risk to human life is also not tolerable.